Colored Empires in the 1930s: Black
Internationalism, the U.S. Black Press, and
George Samuel Schuyler
著者
journal or
publication title
volume
number
page range
year
権利
URL
Taketani Etsuko
American literature
82
1
121-149
2010-03
(C) 2010 by Duke University Press
http://hdl.handle.net/2241/104900
doi: 10.1215/00029831-2009-071
Etsuko
Taketani
Colored Empires in the 1930s:
Black Internationalism, the U.S. Black Press,
and George Samuel Schuyler
I
taly’s invasion of the East African kingdom of Ethiopia on 3 October 1935 showcased the globe-carving forces of Western
imperialism in a gross—and engrossing—manner. In a pageant of blatant aggression, Benito Mussolini’s army and Blackshirt militia, a modern force supported by aircraft armed with poison gas, raided Africa’s
only remaining stronghold of independent black civilization. No other
world event had ever aroused the political passions of the African
American public as did this fascist assault on the motherland of Ethiopia (formerly known as Abyssinia). As John Hope Franklin observes,
“Almost overnight even the most provincial among the American
Negroes became international-minded.”1 In any argument about the
black internationalism of the 1930s, the Italo-Ethiopian War must be
placed first in the chronological table of relevant world affairs.2 As one
of the decisive moments in the articulation of diasporic thought and
politics, the war galvanized black communities throughout the Atlantic hemisphere around a perceived racial solidarity and anti-imperial
activism. George Samuel Schuyler, America’s most prominent black
journalist of the day, stood in for such international-minded black
Americans at the vanguard of the pro-Ethiopian campaigns.
For all its obvious concerns with issues of black internationalism
raised by the Italo-Ethiopian War—and though it gripped the black
popular imagination of its time—Schuyler’s Black Empire, originally
serialized from 1936 to 1938 in the Pittsburgh Courier, has not attracted
much attention from modern critics, even since its 1991 republication
in book form.3 Indeed, the silence of the scholarly community on this
narrative of the liberation of Ethiopia from white colonization has
American Literature, Volume 82, Number 1, March 2010
DOI 10.1215/00029831-2009-071 © 2010 by Duke University Press
122 American Literature
been sufficiently pronounced that, as Kali Tal contends, “the refusal
to discuss the book seems less accidental than the result of deliberate avoidance.”4 The foremost cause for the reluctance of critics to
address this work is no doubt the blazoning race hatred and vengefulness, as well as a megalomania bent on world conquest, fascism,
and empire building, that Black Empire depicts. In its fantastic narrative, the black genius and messiah Dr. Henry Belsidus masterminds a
“Black Internationale” force that wipes the European colonial empires
from the face of the earth and establishes (or restores) a black empire
in Africa. The story also envisages an impending World War II as a
racial Armageddon in which white people meet their fate at the hands
of the Black Internationale. While Schuyler critics agree that Black
Empire is historically and thematically tied to the Italo-Ethiopian discord and ensuing war, as well as to the mass black internationalism
ushered in by the conflict, they are also much troubled by the uncomfortably violent race war fantasies at the heart of Schuyler’s serial fiction. As John Williams observes in his foreword to Black Empire, Belsidus, “in the final analysis, is a dictator, a fascist, though his goals are
established as moral ones” (BE, xiv).
My interest in Black Empire begins precisely where criticism has
fallen silent. I am intrigued by the challenge the work presents to
our tendency as critics to associate blackness automatically with the
political ideals of anti-imperialism and antifascism. It is this tendency
that problematizes any theoretical accounting of the connections and
continuities of the imperial rhetoric, emotive violence, black internationalism, and anticolonialism that constitute the singular text of
Black Empire, and that constituted the pro-Ethiopian movement in the
African American community that Schuyler represented. I am especially interested in questioning, via Schuyler, historical narratives of
the Italo-Ethiopian War—a primal, galvanizing moment that engaged
African diasporic communities around the Atlantic—that have equated
black internationalism with anti-imperialism.
Conceding that there is no return to any origin that is not already a
construction (and hence, that the originary status of the Italo-Ethiopian
War is a kind of retrospective invention), I view it as beyond question
that the fascist invasion of Ethiopia that informed Schuyler’s serial fiction was a decisive moment in the black internationalism of the 1930s.
But toward what end was the mass mobilization of black interest in
foreign affairs catalyzed by the Ethiopian crisis directed? Certainly,
Black Internationalism and George Samuel Schuyler 123
opposition to empire, colonialism, and fascism in world affairs were
central concerns. Brenda Gayle Plummer argues that “[l]ike no other
issue of the era, the Italo-Ethiopian War . . . prepared the ground for
anticolonial protest in the next decade,” and that the war “constituted
a focus for anticolonialist and anti-imperialist discourses.” In Penny
Von Eschen’s account, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia opened “a new
chapter in the organizational history of anticolonialism,” spurring
the formation of numerous groups such as the Ethiopian World Federation; Von Eschen’s own first chapter in Race against Empire thus
begins with a discussion of the Ethiopian crisis.5
Yet in campaigning against empire through their efforts to rescue
Ethiopia, the African American public lent support to a black empire
and its ruler, Emperor Haile Selassie.6 Moreover, even as those calling African Americans to arms in defense of the Ethiopian imperial
government worked to mobilize public opinion against empire, many
(including Schuyler) invoked the Japanese empire as a potential Ethiopian ally. How are we to understand a mass black internationalism that
galvanized racial solidarity in the theater of the Italo-Ethiopian War
through alliance with two colored empire-nations, Ethiopia and quasifascist imperial Japan?
Consider the view that imperialism in the twentieth century is a
practice of, and has its roots in, Western civilization. We have been all
too willing, in delineating the contours of black internationalism, to
accept this view as a central assumption. Indeed, scholarly discourse
on African American responses to the Ethiopian conflict often looks
no further than black alliance campaigns against Italy’s neo-Roman
empire and the complicity of other Western imperialist powers in that
empire. Such discourse implicitly assumes that black thought and
politics are defined as always already counter to—and hence dependent on—the forces of Western imperialism that work against them
and that created the black diaspora in the first place. Thus, Michelle
Stephens argues that “[e]mpire . . . provided the material conditions
for black solidarities to emerge across nation, language, gender, and
even class.” In Stephens’s frame, empire is assumed to be European
and American, with an “international reach and global designs” that
enable a (racially marked) black empire representing multiracial and
multinational worlds of color. Understood strictly in a transatlantic context, Stephens’s black empire is adversarial and dependent, “resisting
empire and carrying its tropes along in their wake.”7 In this concep-
124 American Literature
tion, the primacy of the West in relation to the colored empire-nations
of Asia and Africa is necessarily posited as a material reality and as a
rallying point of reference for black Americans.
In theorizing the black internationalism of the 1930s, I want to go
beyond such (often Eurocentric) assumptions surrounding race and
empire by explicitly addressing African American ideological alignments with colored empires in a global context—alignments for which
the U.S. black press vigorously campaigned during the Italo-Ethiopian
War. In my view, historical narratives of race and empire in the Ethiopian crisis need to be reexamined along both transatlantic and transpacific vectors in light of the dynamics of black internationalism, as
well as at the essentially indissociable levels of both material life and
cultural fantasy. During the years leading up to the conflict, the intimacy of the two empire-nations of Japan and Ethiopia was a factor—
one often overlooked today, but understood world-wide then­—that
altered the dynamics (and the implications) of the war. In the words
of Selassie biographer Harold Marcus, “Tokyo and Addis Abeba were
sentimental about each other.”8 In focusing on this largely forgotten
factor, my aim is to draw attention to what one might call the affective geopolitics of race relations in the 1930s, which complicated the
relationship of black internationalism to the empire, fascism, and colonialism that it denounced in its critique of Mussolini’s occupation
of Ethiopia. Schuyler and the black press offer a lens through which
to examine this politico-affective racial order and the black American reimagining of the relationships between race and empire. The
view this lens affords of these reimagined relationships differs from
Stephens’s perspective (especially in regard to black Americans of
Caribbean descent).
Specifically, I propose in this essay to reconstruct the axis forged
between Tokyo, Addis Ababa,9 and Harlem during the Ethiopian conflict that shaped Schuyler’s—and the collective black—internationalism. In delineating this axis, however, I do not propose a differently
complexioned (Asian) route to a black internationalism that is already
widely understood to have been multifarious and multilayered. Rather,
I wish to reevaluate the mutually implicated perceptions of race and
empire, and of anticolonialism and violence, that informed the black
internationalism arising from the Ethiopian crisis.
Black Internationalism and George Samuel Schuyler 125
Schuyler and the Ethiopian Crisis
Appearing in sixty-two installments written under the pseudonym
Samuel I. Brooks, Black Empire ran as two serials in the Pittsburgh
Courier, an African American weekly, between November 1936 and
April 1938. Black Empire thus began shortly after the end of the ItaloEthiopian War, when it was no longer possible to save Ethiopia. The
narrative of the first serial, “The Black Internationale,” climaxes with
Ethiopia’s liberation from the Italian occupation force, and the second,
“Black Empire,” with crushing defeats for Italy. This fantastic prospect
enthralled the readership of the Courier, and Schuyler’s pulp fiction
gained immense popularity. Such was the groundswell of enthusiasm
for the serials that the circulation of the Courier—already increased
by interest in its coverage of the war—skyrocketed from 40,920 in
1935 to 250,000 in 1937, making the Courier the nation’s largest black
weekly (only 20,000 readers of the paper were local Pittsburgh residents).10 In their afterword to Black Empire, Robert Hill and R. Kent
Rasmussen note that Schuyler had “an uncanny psychological ability
to plumb the desires and fantasies of his black audience” (BE, 267).
Significantly, Schuyler’s was also one of the most outspoken, militant voices supporting the Ethiopian cause in the African American
community.11
The story of Schuyler’s emergence as the standard-bearer of the
Ethiopia campaign is well known. In the summer of 1935, when Ethiopia’s survival in the face of fascist Italy was “the topic of angry debate
in poolrooms, barber shops, and taverns” in Harlem,12 Schuyler was
initially skeptical of the outpouring of support for Ethiopia by African Americans (BE, 270). But the New York–based writer and popular columnist for the Courier did not prove immune to public sentiment. In Hill’s words, “Schuyler underwent a sudden and remarkable
political conversion.”13 In his Courier column, “Views and Reviews,”
Schuyler writes on 27 July 1935 that “the Ethiopian-Italian embroglio [sic] will very likely be the match that will touch off the world
powder keg again”—a war by which “the great exploiting powers of
the world . . . stand to lose everything” and the “exploited blacks and
browns and yellows stand to gain much.” “Another World War will finish Europe,” he predicts in his column of 17 August 1935, reasoning
that while Europe “is engaged in committing hari-kari, the colored
peoples everywhere, in all colonies, will revolt.” “As an old soldier,”
126 American Literature
Schuyler fantasizes about “press[ing] a machine-gun trigger on the
Italian hordes as they toiled over the Ethiopian terrain.”14 Schuyler’s
weekly columns during the period of the Ethiopian situation closely
anticipate the theme of the international race war in Black Empire.
Schuyler’s shift from skeptic to vanguard of anticolonial protest
during the summer of 1935 parallels the rise of the mass black internationalism engendered by the Ethiopian crisis, as scholars usually
describe it (the crisis itself is also typically defined in terms of the
rise of the anticolonial movement). I find little to question in such
historical narratives but suggest that they must account for the violence of the fantasies marking and delimiting Schuyler’s (and black
America’s) anticolonial crusade, as well as the pro–Ethiopian empire
sentiment to which it was yoked. As Hill and Rasmussen point out,
“Violent revenge fantasies suffused Schuyler’s weekly columns during this crisis period, forming a thematic basis for the international
race war that underlies Black Empire” (BE, 271), a war in which the
Black Internationale commands superior, futuristic military technologies such as biological and chemical weapons and electric ray
machines for eradicating white people. Schuyler’s “kill-the-whitepeople” fantasy was part of what enabled Black Empire to “attract a
devoted readership whose interest kept the series alive for two years,”
according to Kali Tal.15 It is interesting that the political ideals of anticolonialism, racial equality, and justice that motivated the contemporary black internationalism movement are seemingly inseparable
from the uncomfortably violent race war fantasies that animated and
sustained that movement. What are the mutual implications of the
violence of these fantasies and the political ideals of “anticolonialism”
that are curiously conflated in Schuyler’s black internationalism? My
criticism of Schuyler’s historical narratives and the collective black
“political conversion” during the Ethiopian conflict begins with this
question.
Hill’s observation that Schuyler underwent a “sudden” conversion
from skepticism at best implies a lack of clarity regarding Schuyler’s
motivations in joining the black internationalist cause. Hill and
Rasmussen explain Schuyler’s move to the vanguard of anticolonial
alliance campaigns in the summer of 1935 as follows:
As the black world waited through the anxious summer of 1935,
watching the military and diplomatic maneuvering that every day
Black Internationalism and George Samuel Schuyler 127
tightened Italy’s noose around the neck of Ethiopia, Schuyler initially adopted a skeptical attitude toward “the clamor of Aframericans” to come to the aid of “dear, old Ethiopia.” While such ventures appeared to him quite impractical, his criticism was directed
far more against “big imperialist powers” and their official impediments to western blacks’ attempts to fight in Ethiopia. Ethiopia’s
bravery in the face of such bullying inspired him nonetheless to a
sort of reverie of racial solidarity. (BE, 270)
It is not entirely clear from Hill and Rasmussen’s description how
Schuyler’s political conversion took place, or even whether the word
“conversion” applies to the shift in Schuyler’s position. At first glance,
it seems that in their account, “the clamor of Aframericans” cumulatively reached a boiling point in the summer of 1935, at which time
Schuyler was also touched by the situation of Ethiopia’s brave but
poorly equipped warriors as they confronted Mussolini’s modern war
machine, and that this converted him to racial solidarity in opposition
to the fascist march. But by Hill and Rasmussen’s logic, Schuyler’s
conversion was to a position, “a sort of reverie of racial solidarity,”
of which he was initially skeptical, and which “appeared to him quite
impractical.” In the end, Schuyler’s conversion during the Ethiopian
crisis cannot readily be explained in terms of a change in his personal
conviction alone. Without an understanding of the shift in the historical context in which the “reverie” became viable, it is not possible to
understand his transformation.
When and how exactly did reverie transform into anticolonial politics? An analysis of the Pittsburgh Courier and other black newspapers
of the time exposes a contextual shift in which the reverie of a race
war to set right (or avenge) through Ethiopia the universal oppression
of the world’s colored peoples became more than an intransitive daydream. On 27 July 1935, the Courier makes the following front-page
observation of an unexpected phase that the Italo-Ethiopian dispute
had entered: “Japan, ‘dark-menace’ of the fighting world and the most
powerful nation of the Far East, may aid Ethiopia! . . . And as Japan’s
attitude became painfully clear to the western world, fear of another
world war . . . a war between races . . . loomed in the offing.”16 This
remark was prompted by Tokyo’s disavowal of Italy’s claim that Japanese Ambassador Yotaro Sugimura had assured Mussolini that Japan
had no intention of interfering in the coming Italo-Ethiopian conflict.
128 American Literature
This disavowal, the Courier reports, precipitated a furor in the Italian
press, including the inflammatory charge that “Japan, in championing
the Abyssinian cause, was setting herself up as a leader of Asiatic and
African peoples against white civilization” and that “the Nipponese
were dreaming of world conquest.”17 (The black weekly New York Age
reports that the Italian press moreover “called upon the white races to
present a united front against the colored races.”18) With Japan stepping into the picture, the Courier anxiously concludes, “another world
war is inevitable”; “This time it appears to be a ‘war of races’ and nothing can stop it.”19
The intensity of the Italian clamor for race war—reported in the
black weekly Courier as resulting from Japan’s apparent alignment
with Ethiopia—is reflected in contemporary reports about the Italian
press that appeared in the mainstream New York Times. According to
a 23–24 July 1935 Times report from Rome, the Italian press en masse
(including Mussolini’s own newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia), angered by
Japan’s new posture of friendliness toward Ethiopia, charged Japan
with long harboring designs to “make that corner of Africa her base
for a vast economic offensive against Europe.”20 As the Italian newspaper Tevere puts it, Africa was “contiguous to Italy, the country of a
white race and the champion of that race.”21 Yet “[w]ith impudence
approaching temerity,” the Messaggero observes, “Japan claims the
right of tutelage over all colored men and does so in a tone that seems
to herald an offensive against our civilization.” It is against “this . . .
almost apocalyptic background that the Italo-Ethiopian conflict must
be viewed,” the newspaper concludes. By gaining control over Ethiopia, Italy, in fine, would be “forestalling Japan”22; thus the Italian press
recast (and justified) the Italo-Ethiopian War. “One has the sensation,”
the Tevere provocatively declares, “of finally learning why so many
races have been created with only one in the image and likeness of
the Creator and why, among other variously colored ones, one is of the
color of betrayal.” Such inflammatory coverage of the war was “posted
on walls throughout [Rome],” according to the New York Times. Fascist
troops and police had to be deployed to guard the Japanese embassy
from the threat of violence aroused by the anti-Japanese sentiment in
the press.23
The perception of Japan as Africa’s new ally elicited as dramatic
a response from U.S. blacks as it did from the fascist Italian press,
only to opposite effect. Japan’s foreign minister in Tokyo received a
Black Internationalism and George Samuel Schuyler 129
telegram from New York that read, “Blacks accalim [sic] Japan leader
[of] colored world expect aid Ethiopia arms munitions.”24 For several
weeks in July and August of 1935, Japan was on the front page of leading African American newspapers, in headlines such as “Japan Prepares to Aid Ethiopia,” “Ethiopian, Italian Armies Face Each Other
in Africa . . . Hostilities Expected Any Minute as Emperor Turns to
Japan,” “Japanese Hit at Mussolini,” “Japanese Scored by Italians:
Attitude of Tokyo Called Hostile,” and “Japan Looms as Bar to Italy,”
among others.25
The fantasy of race war initiated in the Italian press by the Sugimura
affair thus found corresponding canonical expression in the black U.S.
press, in which the Pittsburgh Courier, where Schuyler served as chief
editorial writer and columnist, ranked foremost. In early August, the
Courier carried a follow-up on the earlier report (quoted above) from
Addis Ababa, capital of Ethiopia, as its lead story, under the banner
headline “japan arming ethiopia.” It states, “Japan, mightiest military power of the Far East, is arming Ethiopia! This information, which
is authentic, was given to the people of this country early Monday
[5 August] and flashed to the four corners of the earth.” Japan was supplying the African empire, the account continues, with “‘a very large
consignment’ of arms and ammunition, with the express intention of
‘speeding up modernization of the Ethiopian army.’” According to the
Courier correspondent in Addis Ababa, “Japanese patriotic societies,
public and newspapers have shown decided favoritism for Ethiopia in
the present quarrel.”26 A cartoon on the Courier’s editorial page shows
Mussolini standing with a lawn mower against the backdrop of a rising
sun labeled “JAPAN,” his efforts to mow over Ethiopia frustrated by a
thick cover of Japanese swords sticking up from the ground (fig. 1).
In the Chicago Defender, a black weekly, the race war anticipated in
the black and fascist Italian presses alike was envisioned as the fulfillment of the scriptural prophesy of Armageddon. For the Defender, the
Italo-Ethiopian War would consummate the prophesy of Daniel, which
foretold a conflict between the king of the North and the king of the
South (read Mussolini and Selassie).27 Daniel’s reference to the “intervention of Eastern powers” prefigured Japan’s military aid to the King
of the South, who would win the final victory. The Defender of 13 July
reported, under the scare headline “troops mass for war!,” “Europe
has now suddenly awakened to the realization of the fact that the Japanese navy has been carrying on deep-sea maneuveurs [sic] in the Red
130 American Literature
Figure 1 “Tough Going,” editorial cartoon by Wilbert L. Holloway. Reprinted with permission
from the Pittsburgh Courier, 10 August 1935, 10. Pittsburgh Courier Archives.
Sea . . . for several months,” and “[w]ithin a week’s notice scores of
these swift relentless cruisers from the third largest navy in the world,
can dump tons of explosives under Mussolini’s very nose in Africa.”
In the event of war, claims the Defender, “thousands of Japanese, most
modernly equipped and highly trained soldiers of the world today, will
go tramping through African hinterlands to the aid of their darker
Black Internationalism and George Samuel Schuyler 131
brothers on the lofty plateaus of Ethiopia.”28 “Nordic supremacy,” the
Defender predicts breathlessly, was “fast approaching its doom.”29
The black cultural moment of such mediagenic war projections provided the context for Schuyler’s political conversion. This is not to
suggest that Schuyler’s newfound anticolonial activism centered on a
conviction that Japan and black America would forge a united front in
the event of race war. Schuyler’s black internationalism is by no means
a simple one, as I shall discuss. My point is that it is not possible to
isolate the surge of the “reverie of racial solidarity” among African
Americans in the summer of 1935—in which Schuyler shared—from
the worldwide (and in particular the fascist) racial tension evoked by
the Sugimura affair.
An intriguing aspect of the circulation of the race war fantasy in the
media is the credibility the scenario therein gained. In retrospect, one
might wonder how such an improbable situation as the Japanese army
massing to intervene on behalf of far-off Ethiopia gained any credibility
at all. How was such a scenario, which ultimately informed the production of Schuyler’s near-future science fiction, Black Empire, passed off
as a near-future likelihood in both the black and fascist presses?
The answer to this question lies in what I have referred to as the
affective geopolitics of race relations in the 1930s. To understand this
politico-affective world order from which the fantasy derived its power
and resonance, let us turn to the news of a seemingly odd connection
between Tokyo and Addis Ababa that broke in headlines around the
world during the height of the Ethiopian crisis. When it emerged in
July of 1935 that Japan might intervene in the Italo-Ethiopian conflict,
the Chicago Defender carried two photographs under the umbrella title
“Japanese Remember Shattered Romance.” Over the caption “Objections of Mussolini to union of Japan and Ethiopia through marriage . . .
shattered the international planned romance,” the photographs show
an Ethiopian “prince” and a daughter of a member of the Japanese
peerage whose marriage Il Duce had allegedly derailed the previous
year.30
Announced in January 1934, the engagement of Lij Araya Abeba (a
cousin of Salassie) and “picture bride” Masako Kuroda (daughter of a
Japanese viscount) redrew the emotional geography of race relations
in the 1930s. The planned marriage—which for many would symbolize
the rapprochement of Ethiopia and Japan—had its roots in an unparalleled intimacy between the two empire-nations, often forgotten today,
132 American Literature
that developed rapidly after the 1930 coronation of Emperor Selassie,
based on cultural affinities (both prided themselves on their uniquely
ancient “unbroken lines of emperors”) and growing economic ties.31
I will not survey the international response to news of the planned
marriage here, except to point out that the wedding was cancelled in
the face of the fierce opposition it engendered.32 Many believed that
fascist Italy, operating behind the scenes, effected the cancellation,
and Italy’s perceived involvement had significant implications for
the way in which the Italo-Ethiopian War was projected and viewed.
That Mussolini took the planned marriage to be unsavory cannot be
doubted. In a meeting with Japanese ambassador Sugimura in December 1934, Il Duce protested, “Japan is supplying arms and ammunition
to Ethiopia, sending a crown princess, and a newspaper in Tokyo is
vigorously advocating the maneuvering of Japanese-Ethiopian friendship.”33 For some (including Mussolini), the courtship of the international couple—though a personal matter since it was not a royal
marriage and involved no diplomatic arrangement between Ethiopia
and Japan as was rumored—clearly raised racial, economic, and political concerns, and it functioned as a gestural provocation of race war.
As O. Tanin and E. Yohan allege, “Through the marriage of an Abyssinian prince to the daughter of a Japanese noble the Japanese were
enabled to equip airdromes in Abyssinia and to receive a cotton concession there.”34
The implications of the planned marriage were not lost on Schuyler.
In his Courier column of 3 February 1934, he surmises that the marriage
would give Japan “a foothold on the continent of Africa.” Schuyler predicts that “[a]ssociated with Japan, the Ethiopian kingdom will doubtless become a power in Africa, albeit similar to Manchukoa [sic] and
Korea”—a course of events that Great Britain, France, and Italy “will
not like.”35 The news that the marriage had been cancelled through
the intervention of a “certain power” widely believed to be Italy soon
followed,36 confirming for Schuyler that his reading of the marriage
was correct.
The deep, bilateral historical roots of the tensions between Italy and
Ethiopia notwithstanding, contemporaries thus made sense of the discord through the affective geopolitics of race relations this episode
reflects.37 In September 1934, when reports first emerged that Italy was
sending soldiers and ammunition into the colonies of Somaliland and
Eritrea (on the pretext of protecting its interests from Selassie), the
Black Internationalism and George Samuel Schuyler 133
black press quickly sniffed out Italy’s apprehensions over Japan as an
underlying cause of its military actions. A New York Age editorial makes
the inference that Japan’s “penetration of Abyssinia” was at the root of
Italy’s actions, observing that the planned Ethio-Japanese marriage
had recently been cancelled due to “[o]bjections by Rome.”38 Along
the same lines, the Chicago Defender editorializes, “the most important of all the reasons which occasion Italy’s alarm has been caused
by the manifest interest of Japan in the social and economic affairs
of Abyssinia.” The proposed marriage, according to the Defender, had
the effect of arousing a suspicion in European circles that “back of this
social amenity would be found a political understanding between the
darker people of the Asiatic world.”39 Let us recall that it was, finally,
the breaking off of the engagement—the “shattered romance”—that
the Defender viewed as the key indication that Japan would intervene
militarily in the Italo-Ethiopian dispute in July 1935.
Established authorities on African affairs of the 1930s, including
Schuyler’s colleagues Joel Rogers and George Padmore, also understood this Tokyo–Addis Ababa nexus as a source of the Ethiopian
crisis. Writing in the February 1935 issue of the Crisis, the official
organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP), Rogers contends that in undertaking to arbitrate
the dispute, the League of Nations “will be faced with the toughest
nut in its history,” for “if Geneva succeeds in cracking the outer shell
it will find within a kernel of dynamite, namely Japan.”40 Padmore,
also writing in the Crisis (May 1935), ascribes “[m]uch of Ethiopia’s
present difficulties” to “her friendly relations with Japan.” According
to Padmore’s conspiracy theory, Britain and France had “assigned”
Mussolini the “task to intervene in Ethiopia and break up the ties
between herself and Japan before it [was] too late.”41
Whatever the direction in which one pursues this discourse, it is
certain that a politico-affective racial order emerged from the conflict
as something that required policing—such that the proposed marriage
of an Ethiopian to a Japanese, taken to signal new ties binding the
destinies of African and Asian empires, was proscribed by a cluster
of forces that included media slander, admonition through diplomatic
channels, and threats of war. The Ethiopian crisis was never simply
a consequence of the bilateral animosity between Italy and Ethiopia
arising from Ethiopia’s defeat of Italian forces in the battle of Adowa
in 1896. It occurred within, and reshaped, a matrix of forces that also
134 American Literature
generated a race war fantasy, one that derived its power and resonance from the significant redrawing of race relations that resulted
from the accord of the Ethiopian and Japanese empires. Schuyler and
other black journalists (as well as the fascist Italian press) made sense
of the situation in this milieu, and in overlooking it, we risk missing
crucial implications of the black internationalism the crisis ignited. To
address the seemingly objectionable fantasies that suffuse Schuyler’s
Black Empire, then, is to confront the origins of black internationalism
in the race war fantasy that gained global currency in the mid-1930s,
then mutated after the Italo-Ethiopian War, at which point it was no
longer possible to save Ethiopia from fascist aggression.
Post-Empire
For all its futuristic elements, Schuyler’s pulp science fiction, Black
Empire, reads as a historical archive of the global race war schema
that stood in the collective media as an impending futurity during the
Ethiopian crisis. The symbolic valence that Japan carried in this fantasy resonates in the closing moments of Black Empire; the sweeping victory of the Black Internationale over the white powers in World
War II invokes Japan’s 1905 victory over Russia (BE, 250). Four months
after completing his Black Empire serials, in an essay published in the
August 1938 issue of the Crisis that he called his “most significant
article” from the period,42 Schuyler heralds the historic rise of a real
“Black Internationale of liberation” that encompassed the “sturdy and
canny Nipponese.”43
Schuyler’s historical Black Internationale was by no means idiosyncratic as a form of post-Ethiopia black internationalism that accommodated Japan as an ally of the African diaspora. Groups that similarly
embraced Japan in the pre–World War II epoch included the Nation
of Islam, the Ethiopian Pacific Movement, and the Peace Movement
of Ethiopia, among other black organizations. The black journalist Roi
Ottley observes in 1943 that “the [Negro] nationalist organizations,
those groups which evolved from them, and the factors which kept
them in motion . . . are the main sources of much . . . pro-Japanese
sentiment.”44 Whether or not Ottley’s assessment is correct, I provisionally align Schuyler’s historical Black Internationale here, as a
matter of interpretation, with these black nationalist organizations
under the umbrella of black internationalism, the global race war fan-
Black Internationalism and George Samuel Schuyler 135
tasies of which problematized its own anticolonial political episteme
by embracing imperial Japan.
From the viewpoint of this black internationalism, the coming Second World War was not the “good war” of democracy over the fascism
of normative memory, but rather a race war to avenge and set right a
worldwide order of white oppression—such as that which the ItaloEthiopian War promised but failed to become in actuality. The Nation
of Islam, whose black nationalistic mythologies Henry Louis Gates Jr.
compares to Schuyler’s Black Empire,45 offers an example of a black
nationalist organization that regarded Japan from a similar perspective. As Karl Evanzz documents in a full-length biography of Elijah
Muhammad, early leader of the Nation of Islam, the esoteric teachings of the organization in its formative years were peppered with
references to Japan; for instance, Muhammad described the Mother
Plane—Ezekiel’s wheel in the Holy Bible—as “built in Japan” to carry
out the destruction of the white world.46 In the years before Pearl Harbor, Muhammad repeatedly foretells of the impending destruction of
the white world through an apocalypse in which “[t]he Japanese will
slaughter the white man.” In a sweeping gesture of jihadist optimism,
Muhammad tells his black Muslim audience that it was “Japan’s duty
to save you; they have been given the power by the Asiatic nation
to save you in the West.”47 The many references to the Japanese in
Muhammad’s sermons reveal that what Schuyler called “a common
bond of hatred of white exploitation, persecution and ostracism” was
a crucial underpinning of eschatological beliefs of the Nation of Islam
that encompassed Japan.48 A more secular manifestation of a black
internationalism that embraced Japan was the Harlem-based Ethiopian Pacific Movement, whose leader, Robert O. Jordan (also known
as Leonard Robert Jordan), gave blatantly black nationalist speeches
that shared with Muhammad’s sermons a theme of vengeance against
the white man’s exploitation. Jordan not only expected to “chop foes’
heads off,” as the New York Times reports in 1942, but called for having
“President Roosevelt picking cotton, and Secretaries [Frank] Knox
and [Henry] Stimson riding [him] around in rickshaws” when Japan
crushed the United States in World War II.49
The intensity of the race war fantasy of the black internationalism
of the pre–World War II period—as well as its yoking to pro-Japanese
sentiment—is so unsettling that it is tempting to dismiss it with such
apologetic explanations as the argument that U.S. blacks were mis-
136 American Literature
guided by pro-Axis propaganda planted by Japanese agents. At the
least, it is uncomfortable to acknowledge a link between black internationalism (which we associate with progressive, anticolonialist
political ideals) and empathy for imperial Japan (with all the negative
associations accompanying such an emotion). Yet important questions
emerge upon setting this discomfort aside. What were the grounds of
the appeal that empire—as opposed to democracy—held for American
blacks in the prewar period? What possibilities were inherent in the
mix of pro-empire sentiment and anticolonialist political ideals that
suffused black internationalism? What sorts of postcolonial moments
were prefigured in so unlikely a social text as a global race war fantasy? Approaching such questions requires, as I have suggested, an
understanding of the complexity of the field of forces at work during
the Ethiopian crisis, especially the potentials of a politico-affective
race order enabling a strategic alliance of the Ethiopian and Japanese
empires in the 1930s. But it also requires an understanding of how
these potentials necessarily mutated after the demise of the black
Ethiopian empire in 1936.
In a series of unpublished articles titled “Japan and the Negro,”
Schuyler writes, “Ethiopia was the acid test of Japan’s love for the
darker peoples.” He observes that if Japan had “wanted to help
Ethiopia she could have done so with arms, ammunition, planes and
military instructors and Italy could not have stopped her.” Yet with
all the hyperventilated clamor for war in the summer of 1935, the
rumored military aid from Japan never materialized, and “the sad fact
remain[ed] that Japan left Ethiopia to her fate.”50 (As if this fact were
not “sad” enough, Tokyo and Rome furthermore went on to exchange
diplomatic recognitions of their respective conquests of Ethiopia and
Manchuria, which led to Japan’s alliance with the white Axis powers
in World War II.51) Nevertheless, Schuyler, like Muhammad of the
Nation of Islam, Jordan of the Ethiopian Pacific Movement, and other
allegedly pro-Japanese blacks under FBI surveillance, continued to
embrace Japan in accordance with the ideals of the historical postEthiopia Black Internationale.52
That Schuyler had personal contact with Japanese agents is certain. He was invited to dinner at the Nippon Club in New York on 18
April 1938,53 where among the Japanese agents in attendance was journalist Masao Dodo, who had recently spoken in Harlem in defense
of Japan’s military operations in China. Dodo had swayed the opin-
Black Internationalism and George Samuel Schuyler 137
ions of many African Americans in his audience, one of whom, Arthur
Schomburg, was reported to declare, “If Japan will help the darker
people to gain equal opportunities, I am ready to shoulder arms for
Japan now.”54 Four months earlier, the Pittsburgh Courier had refused
to print Schuyler’s “Japan and the Negro” series, which it had commissioned. Schuyler, alluding to strong undercurrents of pro-Japanese
sentiment among black Americans, not only asserts in this series that
“the majority of thinking Negroes favors Japan,” but maintains that
Japanese victory in Asia offered “an immense psychological satisfaction to the teeming millions of oppressed colored people the world
over”55—an opinion that publisher Robert Vann found too contentiously pro-Japanese and “injudicious” to print.56
Such pro-Japanese sentiment can be viewed as a residue—and a
tenacious one at that—of the reverie of an alliance of colored races
forged through the rapprochement of the Ethiopian and Japanese
empires. Yet from another perspective, such sentiment is precisely
what Schuyler explicitly disavowed after the Italo-Ethiopian War. In
“Japan and the Negro,” he not only criticizes Japan for leaving “Ethiopia to her fate,” but condemns a Japanese (colored) imperialism that
“enslaved millions in Manchuria, Korea, Formosa and Eastern China.”
Indeed, according to Schuyler, the Japanese “ruthlessly murdered,
raped and tortured without let” the Chinese, who are “also a colored
people,” thus evincing, as he writes with evident sarcasm, “a mighty
strange way to show affection for China.” While Schuyler clearly
believed in the “good psychological effect” of the Japanese empire in
Asia on the colored world, he was simultaneously a harsh critic of a
Japan that “has been like all the other aggressor nations, including the
United States.” Even as Japan took the place of Ethiopia on the terrain
of Schuyler’s historical Black Internationale (“Here is no . . . Haile
Selassie to be strafed into submission after a short period of terror”),
Schuyler warned against a transnational alliance of black America and
Japan such as Muhammad, Jordan, and other black nationalists envisioned: “Colored people are barking up the wrong tree if they think
that Japan is out to help anybody except Japan.” “American Negroes,”
writes Schuyler, “need to get the notion out of their heads that some
Saviour is going to come from abroad to help them or that they can
even look outside our borders for aid.”57 Obviously, Schuyler’s Black
Internationale reflects contradictory currents. Parallel to his scathing
criticism of a colored empire in “Japan and the Negro” is his valoriza-
138 American Literature
tion of it. This same contradiction characterizes Black Empire, which
at once critiques and unnervingly echoes imperial and fascist rhetoric
that Belsidus, masterminding a fictional Black Internationale, employs
over the course of the narrative.
One simple but effective way to resolve this contradiction, at least
in the case of Schuyler’s post-Ethiopia Black Internationale, is to read
Black Empire as a parody. Literary critic John Cullen Gruesser takes
this approach, regarding the fiction as an important work of the critical
imagination precisely because its parodic replication of black empire
works to contest it affirmatively. By showing how the Black Internationale proves fascistic and hence “no better than (or just as bad
as) a group of white fascists bent on establishing an empire for their
own aggrandizement,” Gruesser supports his argument that Schuyler
“targets black oppression of black people” (as couched in Marcus
Garvey’s scheme to found a black empire in Africa, and practiced in
Liberia, where Americo-Liberian officials exploited the native African population).58 This line of argument offers a reassuring account
of Schuyler’s discomforting apparent embrace of Japan. But can Black
Empire thus be understood as a parodic replication of the Japanese
empire in an African setting (as much as it was of the Garvey movement and Liberia) that exposes colored oppression of colored people?
There is good circumstantial evidence to support such a reading. In
autumn 1937, two ostensibly unrelated serials appeared atop the feature page of the Courier. In one of them, “Forum of Fact and Opinion,”
W. E. B. DuBois unflinchingly defends the Japanese empire and Japan’s
race war in Asia, maintaining that “Japan fought China to save China
from Europe, and fought Europe through China and tried to wade in
blood toward Asiatic freedom.” Dismissing qualms about “killing the
unarmed and innocent in order to reach the guilty,” DuBois is adamant in his defense of Japan’s actions, alleging that “the same spirit
that animates the ‘white folks’ nigger’ in the United States” motivated
China to “prefer . . . to be a coolie for England rather than acknowledge the only world leadership that did not mean color caste,” namely,
“the leadership of Japan.”59 Printed across the page from DuBois’s
arguments for dismantling white hegemony through Japanese victory,
Schuyler’s Black Empire serials imagined a spectacular possible outcome of global racial oppression.
Colored empire, race war, the overthrow of white hegemony—one
might well surmise that DuBois’s Japan and Schuyler’s Belsidus,
Black Internationalism and George Samuel Schuyler 139
appearing side by side in the same weekly, were de facto embodiments of the same revolutionary agency. It is perhaps no coincidence
that when the second Black Empire serial began its run in the fall
of 1937, Ira Lewis, business manager of the Courier, solicited from
Schuyler the series of articles that would become “Japan and the
Negro.” Lewis wrote to Schuyler, “The Negro is becoming interested
in the foreign situation because somewhere beyond the physical horizon, he has visions of the Japanese becoming the new leader of the
dark peoples.”60 Upon reading the first of the three installments of
Schuyler’s “Japan and the Negro,” Lewis offers Schuyler his opinion that “the tocsin has been sounded, and the Japanese invasion of
China and later India is but a beginning of the self-determination and
self-assertion of the darker races lead [sic] by the Japanese.”61 One
might speculate on the toll the Japanese imperial army exacted on the
beliefs of Courier staff and readers—especially against the backdrop
of Belsidus’s military conquest of Africa as it unfolded in Schuyler’s
pulp fiction. Thus, the Black Empire serials can justifiably be read
as a parodic running commentary on the Japanese imperialism that
the “majority of thinking Negroes”—including DuBois and perhaps
Schuyler himself—“favors.” (If this sounds too far-fetched, recall how
Belsidus’s empire, in hindsight, eerily anticipated Japan’s Greater
East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a bloc of Asian nations “liberated”
from Western imperialist powers that in the end exposed the Japanese
as no less overweening and often even more oppressive than white
colonialists.)
The rendering I have just offered of Black Empire as a satiric parody of colored empire, building on Gruesser, helps explain and exorcise the haunting presence of what is notionally suspect in the terrain of Schuyler’s Black Internationale. But precisely because it is
detached from the pro-Ethiopian matrix from which Schuyler’s (and
a collective) black internationalism developed in the mid-1930s, such
an interpretive narrative eerily approximates the profascist propaganda employed to justify the Italo-Ethiopian War. The rhetoric of the
Ethiopian empire as “black oppression of black people,” as in a parodic
reading of Black Empire, is the very rhetoric profascist apologists such
as Baron Roman Procházka found most serviceable to their cause. In
his libelous pamphlet, Abyssinia: The Powder Barrel (1936), Procházka
contends, “[T]he opponents of Imperialism should bear in mind that
the numerous non-Amharic native tribes in Ethiopia, and these con-
140 American Literature
stitute by far the greater part of the total population of the empire,
are themselves the victims of Abyssinian imperialism. It is therefore
utterly mistaken to represent the Abyssinian usurpers as being in any
way oppressed and worthy of protection.” In the end, says Procházka,
“[t]he empire of the Negus had been built up by conquest and forcible
annexation.”62 Thus did fascist propagandists depict the black empire
as an oppressive political system of control over colored people.
It seems beyond question that Schuyler is to some extent mocking
his readers’ (and perhaps his own) naive faith in race war—and their
related view of Japan as racial savior—but there are clear limits to
reading Black Empire as parodic. At issue here is how we theorize
the appeal that colored empire held in the post-Ethiopian context.
Granted that the union of the African and Asian empires was the vital
ground of both the race war fantasy and the black internationalism of
the 1930s, the downfall of Ethiopia necessarily caused the signification
of colored empire to mutate. How can we, pending the eventual sublation of this empire, reconstrue Schuyler’s Black Internationale and
his near-future war fantasy, which climaxes with the establishment (or
restoration) of a black empire in Africa, as policy-relevant—as something like a projection into the postcolonial future? With this question
in mind, I now turn to a closer analysis of Schuyler’s Black Empire.
Black Empire
Written in the mid-1930s, when demagogy suffused the policy sphere
in international relations, and the media in fascist Italy, black America,
and elsewhere anticipated global race war, Schuyler’s Black Empire
closely engaged the war fantasies circulating in the media. Narrated in
the first person by Carl Slater, ex-reporter for the Harlem Blade, Black
Empire presents a rendition of such a war, thereby both participating
in and parodying the production of the mediagenic fantasy it reflected
in the aftermath of the Italo-Ethiopian War.
There is much to offend in Schuyler’s serialized work, which is
rife with murderous actions against whites. Violence is a fundamental force, even a stroke of poetic justice, in the scheme of the Black
Internationale to liberate Africa from colonialism. In Black Empire, the
zero hour is deliberately set for a great African uprising in which one
race will exterminate or be exterminated by the other. A huge map of
Africa displayed on the wall of Belsidus’s headquarters marks every
Black Internationalism and George Samuel Schuyler 141
important town in electric lights “set to turn green if in our hands and
red if remaining in the hands of the whites” (BE, 124). In this Manichean framework of green or red (read black or white), the subjugated
strike back at the subjugators through the calculated use of bloodshed to cleanse Africa of colonialism and its structural violence. The
Black Internationale attacks white civilization in Africa using aircraftcarried bombs, but the greater part of the “work” of destroying white
civilization is willingly taken on by African natives who slaughter
white men, women, and children at close quarters and with great brutality (BE, 129).
That anticolonialism can be imagined through the violence of colonialism is an interesting paradox. The staging of violence in Black
Empire suggests that in Schuyler’s frame, nonviolence is no alternative to the structural violence of colonialism. Rather than equating anticolonialism with antiviolence, Schuyler uses the trope of violence to
link the experiences of colonialism and racial injustice to progressive
social causes. This rhetorical transformation of revolutionary violence
into work resonates with the classic analysis of violence offered by
the Caribbean-born Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (1963).
In his discussion of the process of decolonization, violence is inevitable and necessary. For Fanon, there is no transition from the socially
constructed Manichean world of black and white that is colonialism;
rather, there is only substitution, and violence is the only means to
break down the colonial machinery: “[I]f the last shall be first, this will
only come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between
the two protagonists,” that is, colonizer and colonized. The production
of violence for Fanon is the “work” through which colonized people
liberate themselves from the passivity of the “thing,” the product of
work for which they have been condemned to labor. On the collective level, the practice of violence unifies a people on a national (and
sometimes a racial) basis, as it “introduces into each man’s consciousness the ideas of a common cause.” Such solidarity alone can overcome the regionalism and tribalism that colonialism not only circumscribes but exploits, dividing the colonial world into “compartments”
in which each of the colonized, conditioned to “stay in his place, and
not to go beyond certain limits,” is imprisoned.63 Schuyler similarly
envisions the creation of a new black man and a unified black nation—
or empire—through the work of violence that is, in Fanon’s phrasing,
“in action all-inclusive and national.”64
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In Black Empire, as in Fanon’s work, anticolonialism is no less anticolonial for being violent. Yet the correspondence between Schuyler
and Fanon must be carefully considered in terms of the convoluted
relation between violence in the “real world” and its fantastic representation. As I have emphasized, Black Empire is a work of pulp fiction
and fantasy. Is the production of a graphic race war scenario tantamount to the production of violence in the flesh in the colonial world
of Fanon’s analysis? What is the work of a violent reverie and what are
its implications for resisting subordination? In “‘That Just Kills Me’:
Black Militant Near-Future Fiction”—one of the first critical texts to
trace a distinguishable, if submerged, vein of “kill-the-white-people”
fantasy and speculative fiction in the African American literary tradition—Kali Tal observes that Schuyler’s work is “deeply uncomfortable
for black and white critics alike, most of whom do not seem inclined to
acknowledge that this level of hostility may exist.”65 Yet Tal, for one,
chooses to face Schuyler squarely, and to take what she sees in his
hostile work as a reflection of the social injustices blacks suffer. She
approaches Schuyler’s pulp fiction as what social scientist James Scott
terms a “hidden transcript,” a discourse that takes place “offstage,”
enacting the anger and reciprocal aggression denied in actual relations of domination.66 In Tal’s view, the reception of Black Empire by
Schuyler’s black audience suggests that “not only is the oppression of
blacks still vigorous in the United States but that African Americans
have stored up enough anger and hatred for white people” to embrace
such a hostile vision.67 The public enthusiasm for Black Empire, which
outpaced Schuyler’s own expectations and even control, may indicate
that the emotionally charged hidden transcript at its heart reproduced
a long-established discourse among black Americans that required
only the form of his pulp fiction to rapidly become collective fantasy.
Yet Black Empire is more than an imagining of violent revolution in
the tradition of the black militant near-future novel, that is, an imagining that draws its social appeal and force from the shared hidden
transcript nurtured by that tradition. It is also made possible by the
emergence in the mid-1930s of race war as a reciprocal fantasy of the
black and fascist Italian presses, the product of the broad and violent
fascination with a “colored empire” triggered by the rumored alliance
of Ethiopia and Japan. Capturing both the colonial and anticolonial
imagination as it engaged the hope and threat of a colored empire,
the fixation on race war reflected the reality portrayed in the media,
Black Internationalism and George Samuel Schuyler 143
which provided the mobilizing force to establish black internationalism even as it served different purposes in fascist Italy in relation to its
invasion of Ethiopia. Outside of the enabling context of this mediated
(and mediagenic) rendering of race war in which reciprocity rules—
reciprocity ironically denied in “peaceful” race relations—the work
of Schuyler’s fantasy in Black Empire cannot be fully apprehended or
appreciated.
Not often noted of Black Empire in its post-Ethiopian context is how
its signification of colored empire mutated from groundwork and origin to an end that lies in the future for black internationalism, accompanied by a corollary shift in the nature of the power—or violence—
of black internationalism. A colored empire, which undergirded the
power of black internationalism during the Italo-Ethiopian conflict,
and from which race war derived its legitimacy, is displaced in Black
Empire to a planned end, a future establishment, in relation to which
the violence of the Black Internationale—however criminal or inhumane—is justified. It is this displacement that renders the Black Internationale of Black Empire less a galvanizing breakthrough movement,
as it would have been during the Ethiopian crisis, than a means to
an end—a means that is moreover subject to the dictating will of the
charismatic race leader Belsidus.
If any genius informs Belsidus’s scheme in Black Empire, it lies in
his systematic reconstruction and reworking of the remnants of the
affective race relations of the post-Ethiopian context, which gave way
to a surge of black internationalism. With no imperial Ethiopia-Japan
axis functioning in the world of the story (that axis having collapsed
in the realm of reality), Belsidus’s elaborate, strategic manipulation of
racial sentiment forges the basis of black internationalism in the fiction. Through a network of quasi-religious “Temples of Love,” Belsidus
reaches the black diasporic population around the world “through their
emotions” and commands them to love one another (BE, 36, 65–66). He
similarly harnesses anger—which offers yet another common ground
for members of the colored race—to power the economy of black solidarity, assembling to work under him black scientists and engineers
who “possess . . . hatred and resentment, that fuel which operates
the juggernaut of conquest” of the white world (BE, 15). The war Belsidus instigates likewise does not end in the physical destruction of
white civilization, but rather in the terror he produces in the white
race through violence. This terror reflects their hegemony, which is
144 American Literature
clothed as democracy but sustained through slavery, Jim Crow, and
lynching. Belsidus thus prosecutes his race war in the United States
by inflaming hatred and terrorism among white Americans until it
“roll[s] along under its own momentum” to their self-destruction (BE,
83). In Europe, white people die “like flies” in the “bestial fear and
terror” of the Second World War, killing each other off and thus committing, to borrow from Schuyler’s Courier column of 17 August 1935,
racial “hari-kari” (BE, 138). In view of the performative role of terror
in the fiction, one begins to understand the fine line upon which Japan
stands in Schuyler’s notion of the post-Ethiopia Black Internationale.
Schuyler championed the Japanese (colored) empire because of its
“psychological” impact on a white Western hegemony perpetuated in
the name of prosperity, order, and peace. In the essay in the Crisis discussed above, “The Rise of the Black Internationale” (which Hill and
Rasmussen read as an “ideological companion piece” to Black Empire
[BE, 279]), Schuyler observes how blacks in the United States see
“erstwhile haughty whites cowering in the shell-holes of Shanghai, a
British ambassador machine gunned on the road to Nanking and an
American gunboat bombed to the bottom of the Yangste [sic] River
without reprisal from a Caucasia become panic-stricken and paralyzed.” Japan’s war in Asia, Schuyler predicts, in tandem with resistance in other parts of the darker world, would set the stage for the
arrival of a “New Negro” who is “[n]o longer . . . terrorized” but “waits,
schemes and plans” to launch a “Black Internationale of liberation”68—
a development that Belsidus rehearses in the realm of fiction.
In Schuyler’s first Black Empire serial, Belsidus’s race war accomplishes its intended end. The Black Internationale crushes Italy and
other imperialist powers and brings about the establishment of a
futuristic Empire of Africa. Belsidus defines this end as a restoration,
proclaiming upon its achievement that “Africa belongs once more to
the Africans” (BE, 140). With this restoration of black rule, symbolically coterminous with a regained Ethiopia, a form of racial harmony
between blacks and whites is recovered. Belsidus delivers the following address to delegates assembled from all parts of the colored world:
“Now that we have ousted the white man from Africa, let us not waste
time hating the white man. . . . Let us stay out of his lands and be sure
that he stays out of ours. The world is plenty large enough for both of
us. If we properly take care of our part, we shall maintain our independence forever and forever” (BE, 141). The race leader thus envisions
Black Internationalism and George Samuel Schuyler 145
in the Empire of Africa what looks like a postcolonial condition of race
relations, one that justifies all of the violence of the race war that he
instigated and waged.
Inspired by the Ethiopian crisis, the first serial ends with the restoration of Ethiopia and racial harmony, coupled together—an ending that is reprised in the second serial. Yet this restorative ending
marks an incongruous moment in Black Empire, since the real black
empire—Ethiopia—never afforded any such precursory interracial
accord to which white and colored people might return. Operating as
the ground from which black anticolonial campaigns launched, but
mutating into an end that lies in the future, a restored Ethiopia, or black
empire, does not in Schuyler’s fiction ultimately promise postcolonial
interracial harmony as the original state of race relations presumed
to exist before the downfall of Africa’s oldest independent black civilization. Invented and yet nostalgically remembered as restored, the
colored empire that enables race harmony at the close of Black Empire
amounts to no more than a signifier reminding us that Belsidus and
his Black Internationale will never attain that to which it points.
It is this subtle ground that the colored empire occupies, and from
which the articulation of something like a counterdiscourse to racism
and colonial oppression becomes possible in a post-Ethiopian context. What I have proposed in this essay is to reclaim this ground that
Schuyler reconnoitered by clarifying the cultural work of the signifying colored empire and the race war fantasy it engenders. Arguing as I
have for a violent fantasy that marked and delimited black internationalism as it revolved around an axis of colored empires—the empires of
Ethiopia and Japan in the 1930s—is admittedly a slippery project. The
global scenario, though imagined as a near future likelihood in the
black and fascist presses alike, was later advocated and lived out by
only a handful of pro-Japanese, FBI-surveilled black nationalist organizations. In the Courier, it was supplanted by the “Double V” campaign
that the weekly launched after Pearl Harbor in 1942. Yet the scenario,
as enacted (and parodied) in Black Empire, should not be consigned
to historical oblivion. Envisioned to restructure politico-affective race
relations in the post-Ethiopian era, Schuyler’s near-futurist pulp fiction gave the signifying colored empire—as both the basis for a militant black anticolonial crusade and a projection into a postcolonial
future that justifies race war—full play in the black imagination. Black
Empire thus affords a deeper understanding of what the black inter-
146 American Literature
nationalism of the mid-1930s was fighting for in its violent fascination
with empire and race war.
University of Tsukuba
Notes
I wish to thank Jonathan Auerbach and Michael Keezing for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay.
1 John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, 3rd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1969), 574.
2 Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign
Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996), 37;
Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1997), 11.
3 George S. Schuyler, Black Empire, ed. Robert A. Hill and R. Kent Rasmussen (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1991). All references to Black
Empire are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text as
BE.
4 Kali Tal, “‘That Just Kills Me’: Black Militant Near-Future Fiction,” Social
Text 20 (summer 2002): 79.
5 Plummer, Rising Wind, 51, 80; Von Eschen, Race against Empire, 11.
6 The Ethiopian emperor’s name is also spelled Haile Sellassie.
7 Michelle A. Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of
Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962 (Durham, N.C.:
Duke Univ. Press, 2005), 5, 13, 31.
8 Harold G. Marcus, Haile Sellassie I: The Formative Years, 1892–1936
(1987; reprint, Lawrenceville, N.J.: Red Sea Press, 1998), 200 n. 46.
9 The capital of Ethiopia is variably spelled Addis Abeba or Addis Ababa.
I use the latter spelling, which has been more commonly employed in
English-speaking countries.
10 Andrew Buni, Robert L. Vann of the “Pittsburgh Courier”: Politics and Black
Journalism (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1974), 224, 257.
11 Robert A. Hill, introduction to George S. Schuyler, Ethiopian Stories, ed.
Robert A. Hill (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1994), 14.
12 Roi Ottley, “New World A-Coming”: Inside Black America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), 109.
13 Hill, introduction to Schuyler, Ethiopian Stories, 14.
14 “Views and Reviews,” 27 July 1935, 10; “Views and Reviews,” 17
August 1935, 10; “Views and Reviews,” 27 July 1935, 10.
15 Tal, “That Just Kills Me,” 80, 79.
16 “Another World War Threatens as Japan Talks,” Pittsburgh Courier, 27
July 1935, 1, 4.
17 Ibid., 4.
Black Internationalism and George Samuel Schuyler 147
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
“‘Civilizing’ Ethiopia,” New York Age, 3 August 1935, 6.
“Another World War Threatens,” 4.
“Rome Press Turns Attack on Japan,” New York Times, 23 July 1935, 12.
“Japanese Embassy Guarded,” New York Times, 23 July 1935, 12.
“Rome Press Turns Attack on Japan,” 12.
“Japanese Embassy Guarded,” 12; see also “Attacks on Japan Continue,”
New York Times, 24 July 1935, 8.
Arden Brizan Lester Taylor (Nationalist Negro Movement) to the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs of Japan, telegram, 9 August 1935, Ref. B02031218800,
Japan Center for Asian Historical Records ( JACAR), National Archives of
Japan, Tokyo.
“Japan Prepares to Aid Ethiopia,” Indianapolis Recorder, 13 July 1935,
1; “Ethiopian, Italian Armies Face Each Other in Africa . . . Hostilities
Expected Any Minute as Emperor Turns to Japan,” Chicago Defender, 13
July 1935, 1; “Japanese Hit at Mussolini,” New York Amsterdam News, 20
July 1935, 1; “Japanese Scored by Italians: Attitude of Tokyo Called Hostile,” New York Age, 27 July 1935, 1; “Japan Looms as Bar to Italy,” Chicago
Defender, 27 July 1935, 1.
“Japan Arming Ethiopia,” Pittsburgh Courier, 10 August 1935, 1.
“Is Ethiopia Stretching Forth Her Hand?” Chicago Defender, 20 July 1935,
10.
“Troops Mass for War!” Chicago Defender, 13 July 1935, 1.
“Is Ethiopia Stretching Forth Her Hand?” 10.
“Japanese Remember Shattered Romance,” Chicago Defender, 13 July
1935, 1.
For Ethiopia-Japan relations during the early 1930s, see Richard Albert
Bradshaw, “Japan and European Colonialism in Africa, 1800–1937” (PhD
diss., Ohio University, 1992), 306–18; and Marcus, Haile Sellassie I, 200
n. 46.
For accounts of this engagement, see Kazuhiro Yamada, Masukaru no
Hanayome (The Bride of Maskal) (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha, 1998); and
J. Calvitt Clarke III, “Marriage Alliance: The Union of Two Imperiums,
Japan and Ethiopia?” users.ju.edu/jclarke/wizzs.html (4 January 2008).
Yotaro Sugimura to Koki Hirota (Foreign Minister), 14 December 1934,
Ref. B02031217400, JACAR. My translation.
O. Tanin and E. Yohan, When Japan Goes to War (New York: Vanguard,
1936), 14.
“Views and Reviews,” 3 February 1934, 10.
“Italy Scotches African Prince’s Plan to Take Japanese Bride,” Washington Post, 3 April 1934, 1; Kendall Foss, “Japan’s ‘Conquest’ of Ethiopia
Halts at Il Duce’s Frown,” Washington Post, 8 April 1934, B1; “Abyssinian
Ends Troth to Japanese,” New York Times, 3 April 1934, 11.
In this regard, my account of the Ethiopian crisis differs from that of
William R. Scott, who views Japan’s role as no more than an “interest-
148 American Literature
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
ing” historical footnote (The Sons of Sheba’s Race: African Americans and
the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935–1941 [Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press,
1993], 249 n. 48).
“‘Holy War’ A Trade War,” New York Age, 22 September 1934, 6.
“Watching Hailie [sic] Selassie,” Chicago Defender, 22 September 1934,
14.
J. A. Rogers, “Italy over Abyssinia,” Crisis 42 (February 1935): 38.
George Padmore, “Ethiopia and World Politics,” Crisis 42 (May 1935):
157.
George S. Schuyler, Black and Conservative: The Autobiography of George S.
Schuyler (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1966), 248.
George S. Schuyler, “The Rise of the Black Internationale,” Crisis 45
(August 1938): 277, 256.
Ottley, New World A-Coming, 104.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., “A Fragmented Man: George Schuyler and the
Claims of Race,” New York Times Book Review, 20 September 1992, 42.
Karl Evanzz, The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad (1999;
reprint, New York: Vintage, 2001), 118–19.
FBI headquarters file on Elijah Muhammad; quoted in Evanzz, The Messenger, 106.
Placard announcing Black Empire; quoted in Hill and Rasmussen, afterword to BE, 267.
“Revenge All Planned by Harlem Fuehrer,” New York Times, 16 September 1942, 16; “Trial Bares Dream of a Harlem Nazi,” New York Times, 16
December 1942, 11.
George S. Schuyler, “Japan and the Negro,” 3 installments. Schuyler
Family Papers: George S. Schuyler: Writings, Box 8, Folder 10, 1:4,
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York.
J. Calvitt Clarke III, “The Politics of Arms Not Given: Japan, Ethiopia,
and Italy in the 1930s,” in Girding for Battle: The Arms Trade in a Global
Perspective, 1815–1940, ed. Donald J. Stoker Jr. and Jonathan A. Grant
( Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003), 146.
Jeffrey B. Ferguson, The Sage of Sugar Hill: George S. Schuyler and the
Harlem Renaissance (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2005), 27.
“Guests at Dinner” list, George S. Schuyler Papers, scrapbook, vol. 16,
microfilm reel 6, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, N.Y. Among the other black guests invited was
Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP.
“Sino-Jap Dispute Explained to Harlemites,” New York Amsterdam News,
5 February 1938, 4.
Schuyler, “Japan and the Negro,” 1:1, 2:1.
Ira F. Lewis to Schuyler, 29 December 1937. Box 1, Folder 2, George S.
Schuyler Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, N.Y.
Black Internationalism and George Samuel Schuyler 149
57 Schuyler, “Japan and the Negro,” 3:1, 2:3, 1:3, 2:4, 1:4, 2:4, 3:4.
58 John Cullen Gruesser, Black on Black: Twentieth-Century African American Writing about Africa (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2000), 111,
116.
59 W. E. B. DuBois, “Forum of Fact and Opinion,” Pittsburgh Courier, 23
October 1937, 11.
60 Ira F. Lewis to Schuyler, 22 November 1937, Box 1, Folder 2, George S.
Schuyler Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, N.Y.
61 Lewis to Schuyler, 29 December 1937.
62 Baron Roman Procházka, Abyssinia: The Powder Barrel (London: British
International News Agency, [1936]), 1, 54.
63 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington
(New York: Grove Press, 1963), 37, 93, 94, 51–52.
64 Ibid., 94.
65 Tal, “That Just Kills Me,” 67, 80.
66 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts
(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1990), 4, 37–38.
67 Tal, “That Just Kills Me,” 79.
68 Schuyler, “The Rise of the Black Internationale,” 275, 277. Schuyler
reprises the gist of his idea in “Japan and the Negro,” 1:3–4.